Mumbai’s Royal Opera House is opening a jazz bar

Acoustics by Andy Munro and Kapil Thirwani, who’ve worked magic for Coldplay, U2, and the now-shuttered blueFROG

Cafe at The Quarter at Mumbai's Royal Opera House. Photo: Kaushal Parikh

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A year after Mumbai’s Royal Opera House raised its curtains after a six-year renovation, the historic venue has a fresh surprise. The Quarter, comprising a cocktail bar, al-fresco restaurant, café and jazz bar at the opera house, opens its doors next week.

The first fortnight is reason enough to cheer, with opening night sets with the likes of Loy Mendonca, Vasundhara, British saxophonist Sean Freeman and The Quarter’s artistic director and musician Ranjit Barot, and shows by Grammy-winning Tuareg rock band Tinariwen.

The music

Live at the Quarter is a jazz bar in the broadest sense of the term. “We’re looking at jazz from a more holistic point of view where it’s an exploration of improvisation,” says founder-director Ashutosh Phatak, musician and co-founder of True School of Music and the iconic, now-shuttered Mumbai venue blueFROG. “It can be electronic music, it can be pop, it can be hip hop—with the element of improvisation that gives you the feeling that you’re seeing something new. We’re tweaking the material of every artist that comes down and collaborating with them on what could be experienced for this space and this city.”

But while electronica may feature, “this is not a nightclub,” Phatak clarified, “this is a listening environment”. It will be “a place where you’re very close to the artist, sitting with a cocktail and listening to the music,” businessman and investor Nakul Toshniwal tells us.

The programming by Barot and Phatak is geared to give local musicians a platform and have them “collaborate with fantastic acts from abroad,” said Phatak. Among the first acts is pop duo Parekh and Singh, who will perform their versions of the songs that have inspired them at the jazz bar, as well as play at the opera house with a string quartet.

The space

The Quarter was designed by architect Abha Narain Lambah, who also worked on the restoration of the early 20th-century opera house. Expect a casual, elegant vibe, with lots of bay windows, distressed furniture, dazzling chandeliers and bevelled mirrors. Acoustic designers Andy Munro and Kapil Thirwani, who have previously worked with Coldplay and blueFROG, kitted out the jazz bar. Each space is intimate—the bar stands 80 people; the mozzarella and wine bar above the café seats 25; the restaurant seats 100.

The venue is planned to keep guests lingering. “You start with a pre-show glass of wine, then the show at the opera house, followed by dinner and coffee, and the after-party at the jazz club,” said restaurateur Nico Goghavala (of former eateries Nico and Farmer & Sons). While there are plans to serve special cocktail and food themed to specific events, the restaurant menu is Louisiana Creole in homage to New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. The mozzarella bar sources from Indian cheesemakers in Gujarat, the Nilgiris, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.

The Quarter came together with a touch of coincidence and as it turns out, Conde Nast. Late last year, Phatak, Toshniwal and Barot had been scouting locations for a new tiny jazz club. At the crew party of Vogue BFFs, Phatak bumped into Goghavala, who had plans to open a jazz club at the Royal Opera House. They all turned up at the opera house the next day for their first meeting.

The venue is a work in progress, one that the founder-directors hope will evolve with “a lot of feedback from the city about what to programme,” Phatak said, “We eventually want to make this a cultural hub.” They hope to do poetry readings in the café, hold music appreciation classes, perhaps theatre, stand-up comedy and even farmers’ markets.

The Quarter opens a decade after blueFROG launched in 2007, revolutionising the gigging scene. “It was definitely a catalyst,” Phatak says. The venue closed last year after purportedly struggling to create a viable business model. “Here, the problem is that ticket sales are not paying enough for artists to perform,” Phatak said, “We’re trying to bridge that gap by saying maybe we’ll make some money from the food and the booze. Our responsibility is to make the musicians and the audience recognise the value of each other.”